December 13th, 2010 Via: Independent:
The Vatican Bank is under new scrutiny in a case involving money-laundering allegations that led police to seize €23m (£19.25m) in September.
The Vatican calls the seizure of assets a “misunderstanding” and expresses optimism it will be quickly cleared up. But fresh court documents show that prosecutors say the Vatican Bank deliberately flouted anti-laundering laws “with the aim of hiding the ownership, destination and origin of the capital”. The documents also reveal investigators’ suspicions that clergy may have acted as fronts for corrupt businessmen and Mafia.
The documents pinpoint two transactions that have not been reported: one in 2009 involving the use of a false name, and another in 2010 in which the Vatican Bank withdrew €650,000 from an Italian bank account but ignored bank requests to disclose where the money was headed.
The new allegations of financial impropriety could not come at a worse time for the Vatican, already hit by revelations that it sheltered paedophile priests. The corruption probe has given new hope to Holocaust survivors who tried unsuccessfully to sue in the United States, alleging that Nazi loot was stored in the Vatican Bank.
Posted in Atrocities, Covert Operations, Dictatorship, Economy, Elite, Religion
"Where is the intersection between the world's deep hunger and your deep gladness?"
December 13th, 2010 Via: Independent:
The Vatican Bank is under new scrutiny in a case involving money-laundering allegations that led police to seize €23m (£19.25m) in September.
The Vatican calls the seizure of assets a “misunderstanding” and expresses optimism it will be quickly cleared up. But fresh court documents show that prosecutors say the Vatican Bank deliberately flouted anti-laundering laws “with the aim of hiding the ownership, destination and origin of the capital”. The documents also reveal investigators’ suspicions that clergy may have acted as fronts for corrupt businessmen and Mafia.
The documents pinpoint two transactions that have not been reported: one in 2009 involving the use of a false name, and another in 2010 in which the Vatican Bank withdrew €650,000 from an Italian bank account but ignored bank requests to disclose where the money was headed.
The new allegations of financial impropriety could not come at a worse time for the Vatican, already hit by revelations that it sheltered paedophile priests. The corruption probe has given new hope to Holocaust survivors who tried unsuccessfully to sue in the United States, alleging that Nazi loot was stored in the Vatican Bank.
Posted in Atrocities, Covert Operations, Dictatorship, Economy, Elite, Religion
Ha ha ha!, 'Ya gotta love it, if you know about the Vatican and 'banking'!...not to mention pedophilia or the Holocaust and WWII. What a small 'nation' with a huge illegal and ugly 'footprint' in crime and international criminal behaviors....... Certainly 'god' will sort this all out.....tickyman: Sorry to all Catholics here, but to me as anachronistic as the British or other monarchies....a fossil of the past - and not a benevolent one. Best sent to the Society for Creative Anachronisms and left at that....deleted as a real and relevant entity, IMO....along with most other 'organized' religions [most something like organized crime - but this one take the 'cake'].
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
The Vatican is threatening to take legal action against those responsible for publishing a new book of leaked internal documents. The book sheds light on power struggles and corruption inside the Holy See and the thinking of its embattled top banker.Pope Benedict XVI has already appointed a commission of cardinals to investigate the "Vatileaks" scandal. It erupted earlier this year with the publication of leaked memos alleging corruption and mismanagement in Holy See affairs and internal squabbles over its efforts to comply with international anti-money-laundering norms.The publication Saturday of "His Holiness" by Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, added fuel to the fire, reproducing confidential letters and memos to and from Pope Benedict and his personal secretary which, according to the Vatican, violated the pope's right to privacy.Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said in a statement Saturday the book was an "objectively defamatory"work that "clearly assumes characters of a criminal act." He warned the Holy See would get to the bottom of who "stole" the documents, who received them and who published them. He warned the Holy See would seek international cooperation in its quest for justice, presumably with Italian magistrates.The Vatican had already warned of legal action against Nuzzi after he published letters in January from the former second-highest Vatican administrator to the pope. In those letters the administrator begged not to be transferred for having exposed alleged corruption that cost the Holy See millions of euro in higher contract prices. The prelate, Monsignor Carlo Maria Vigano, is now the Vatican's US ambassador.Nuzzi, author of Vatican SpA, a 2009 volume laying out shady dealings of the Vatican Bank based on leaked documents, said he was approached by sources inside the Vatican with the trove of new documents. Most of them are of fairly recent vintage and many of them painting the Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, in a negative light.Much of the documentation is fairly Italy-centric: about a 2009 scandal over the ex-editor of the newspaper of the Italian bishops' conference, a previously-unknown dinner between Benedict and Italy's president, and even a 2011 letter from Italy's pre-eminent talk show host Bruno Vespa to the pope enclosing a check for 10,000 euro for his charity work and asking for a private audience in exchange.But there are international leaks as well, including diplomatic cables from Vatican embassies from Jerusalem to Cameroon. Some concern the conclusions of the pope's delegate to the disgraced Legion of Christ religious order. In a memo sent to the pope last autumn he warned that the financial situation of the order, beset by a scandal over its pedophile founder, "while not grave, is serious and pressing."Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, the head of the Institute for Religious Works, otherwise known as the Vatican Bank, gets significant ink. His private memos to the pope with his take on the Vatican's response to the global financial crisis and how to handle the church's tax exempt status amid Italian government efforts to crack down on tax evasion have also been published.The bank has been trying for some two years to remedy its reputation as a shady tax haven beset by scandals. One of them is the collapse of Italy's Banco Ambrosiano and the death of its head, Roberto Calvi, who also helped manage Vatican investments and was found hanging from London's Blackfriars Bridge in 1982.In a bid to show it has mended its ways, the Institute for Religious Works this week invited ambassadors from 35 countries in for a tour and a chat with its managing director as part of a new transparency campaign. The tour came on the same day Holy See representatives were in Strasbourg discussing the first draft of a report from a Council of Europe committee on the Vatican's compliance with international norms to fight money laundering and terrorism financing.British Ambassador Nigel Baker, who went on the Institute for Religious Works tour, later blogged that the Vatican's reputation depends on showing that its institutions are transparent."Plenty still needs to be done. But the Holy See needs to stick to its guns. It is in their interest, and ours," Baker wrote. http://www.rt.com/news/vatican-slams-lea...minal-694/
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
The pope's butler has been formally charged over suspicions he leaked a large number of confidential letters addressed to Benedict XVI which have lifted the lid on alleged corruption and nepotism at the Holy See.
Vatican magistrates charged Paolo Gabriele, 46, with illegal possession of secret documents and said a wider investigation would take place to see if he had any accomplices who helped him leak them.
Gabriele, who has worked as Benedict's butler since 2006, was taken into custody after investigators reportedly found a mass of documents in the Vatican apartment he shares with his wife and three children.
The arrest comes a month after the Vatican gave an investigative team led by Cardinal Julián Herranz, a member of Opus Dei, a full "pontifical mandate" to join Vatican police in rooting out the perpetrators of what has been dubbed Vatileaks.
Gabriele is a member of the 85-year-old pontiff's closest circle of helpers, assisting him in his papal apartment at the Vatican alongside four female members of the Italian religious movement Comunione e Liberazione who cook and clean.
The Rome-born butler is in custody in the Vatican's cells.
"We have cells," said a Vatican spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi. "It is a simple structure, since this is a small state, but we have them."
Among the most serious leaks published this year is a letter from Carlo Maria Viganò, the former deputy governor of Vatican City, denouncing inflated contracts with friendly companies, false invoicing and missing cash.
Further revelations were published this week in a book by a journalist, Gianluigi Nuzzi, who described how an unnamed whistleblower sent emissaries to sound him out before they held secret meetings in an unfurnished rented flat near the Vatican. "I wore a USB round my neck for six months with the leaked documents on it," Nuzzi said. "It was like something out of a film."
In the book, the source says he was coming clean because "hypocrisy within the Vatican goes unchallenged and scandals multiply".
The book, which was described as criminal by the Vatican, alleged that the editor of the Vatican's newspaper started a gay smear campaign against a rival editor, with the help of a newspaper owned by the Berlusconi family.
Letters depict collusion between the Berlusconi government and the Vatican over how to avoid EU pressure to make the Catholic church pay tax on its properties.
Huge cash donations to the pope from banks and a TV presenter are described, as well as a €100,000 (£80,000) truffle sent by a businessman which was donated to the poor.
"After Pope John Paul II's death I started putting aside copies of some documents that came into my possession thanks to my work," the source told Nuzzi.
"Initially I did it sporadically. When I saw that the truth coming out in the newspapers and official speeches did not match the truth in the documents I put everything aside in a folder to try and investigate and understand."
The source said his growing disenchantment with the "personal interests and hidden truths" at the Vatican was shared by other people living and working in the city state, but "nobody knows who all the others are".
The letters show the Vatican's secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, in a bad light but spare the pope. "The source backed Benedict's reforming spirit. The problem is that the pope has not been able to achieve things very quickly," said Nuzzi.
Marco Tosatti, a Vatican expert at La Stampa newspaper, said: "I don't believe they would have arrested him if they didn't have real proof, but I believe he is not the only guilty one. I imagine he will go before an Italian court and risks 20 years for stealing correspondence from a head of state."
Other letters reveal a row over improving transparency at the Vatican bank after it was implicated in the 1980s in the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano whose chairman, Roberto Calvi, was found hanging under London Bridge.
On Thursday, the Vatican bank's president, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, who was brought in to improve transparency, was ousted "for not having carried out various responsibilities of primary importance regarding his office," the Vatican said in a statement.
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War." Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta." The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
Quote:Pope's butler charged over leaked Vatican letters
Paolo Gabriele charged with illegal possession of documents after whistleblowing book alleges corruption at Holy See
Now, this, this they think is a crime. What, no moving the butler to a quiet parish?
Magda - indeed.
Shamefully, the Catholic Church makes appearance after abusive appearance in the thread here.
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War." Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta." The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
It is almost cliche' that 'the butler did it'...but apparently, in this case, he did.....it is all gone into some book with dirty laundry of the Vatican......there certainly is much to tell in that vein...going back about 2000 years or so. All organized religions, as far as I can see have skeletons in their closets. Some more than others. :p
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
The ousted head of the Vatican bank came under a withering counter-attack at the weekend as his former top official accused him of negligence and leaked documents were published casting doubt on his mental health.
The Vatican meanwhile warned Italian prosecutors against using information in papers seized last week from the bank's ex-president, saying it may be covered by the Holy See's "sovereign prerogatives".
Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, who was appointed by Pope Benedict to bring the Vatican into line with international regulations on money laundering, was dismissed last month from the presidency of the bank, known as the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR). The financier was last week reported to have prepared a series of dossiers to be sent to named individuals in the event of his sudden death. According to an Italian prosecutor, Gotti Tedeschi has said his problems at the bank started after he demanded to see "information about accounts that were not in the church's name".
But his former general manager, Paolo Cipriani, said in an interview published on Sunday that there were no numbered accounts at the Vatican bank and the only Italians, apart from priests, monks and nuns, who banked with the IOR were lay employees or pensioners of the Holy See. The former president had been invited to inspect lists of accounts. "We repeatedly asked the president to interest himself in the institute, but he didn't take things in hand. It was as if he were absent, even when he was present," Cipriani said.
Aspersions were also cast on the ousted banker by a psychotherapist who advises the IOR on the welfare of its employees. After observing Gotti Tedeschi's behaviour at last year's Vatican bank Christmas party, Dr Pietro La Salvia wrote a report published in the daily Il Fatto Quotidiano which the paper said was handed to Benedict's right-hand man, secretary of state Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.
The report said that the banker displayed "traits of egocentricity, narcissism and a partial disconnection from reality that could be a psychopathological dysfunction". Gotti Tedeschi, aged 67, has held a string of senior appointments in Italian banking and currently runs the Italian unit of the Spanish bank Banco Santander.
Other documents leaked to Il Fatto Quotidiano gave a new insight into the venomous behind-the-scenes divisions at IOR. One was a letter from a member of the bank's four-man lay oversight board, who wrote to Bertone at about the time the cardinal was said to have received La Salvia's complaints of Gotti Tedeschi's "increasingly eccentric behaviour".
Carl Anderson, the head of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic lay fellowship, said: "His occasional communications with me are focused not on the life of the institute but on internal political maneuvering and on denigrating others."
The vice-president of the board, Ronaldo Schmitz, a former executive director of Deutsche Bank, also wrote to the secretary of state just before the meeting at which Gotti Tedeschi was fired to say that he would resign if the then president were not removed. Until now, speculation over the reason for his dismissal has centered on known differences over the Holy See's new anti-money laundering measures.
An independent watchdog was set up in 2010, but its charter was changed, prompting claims that some in the Vatican were less than keen on full transparency.
The issue of accounts belonging to outsiders has added a new twist to the story. But Cipriani told Corriere della Sera: "There are no secrets [and] no mystery.
Vatican Diary / Opus Dei and the gendarmes win the first round
The leaking of documents has reinforced their positions in the curia. But the American party is also advancing. While for the secretariat of state, the candidacy of a non-Italian is gaining strength
by ***
VATICAN CITY, June 28, 2012 The pope's "butler," Paolo Gabriele, remains in custody as the only suspect in the crime. At the moment, it is one of aggravated theft. The investigative commission of cardinals that is working in parallel with the Vatican magistracy is continuing its hearings.
It is not known how long it will take for the two investigations to the reach a conclusion. But this does not mean that the so-called "Vatileaks" case has not already had an impact on the life of that particular organism which is the Roman curia.
Far from it. Some consequences, in fact, can already be identified in the short term, while others can be conjectured in the medium and long term.
OPUS DEI AND THE UNITED STATES
To begin with, in just a few weeks there has been an increase in the curia of the visible role of Opus Dei, which already numbers, in the organizational structure, the secretary of the pontifical council for legislative texts (Bishop Juan Ignacio Arrieta, of the clergy of Obra), the secretary of the congregation for the clergy (Archbishop Celso Morga Iruzubieta, of the priestly fraternity of the Holy Cross, connected to Opus) and the secretary of the prefecture of economic affairs (Monsignor Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda).
The head of the investigative commission of cardinals, in fact, is Cardinal Julián Herranz, a member of Opus Dei and former president of the same dicastery as Arrieta.
Not only that. Chosen for the unprecedented role of communications "adviser" to the secretariat of state is Greg Burke, a numerary of Obra who may be able to restore the splendor of JoaquÃn Navarro Valls, also a numerary, the famous spokesman of John Paul II.
Burke will be working alongside the media "crisis unit" of the Apostolic Palace made up of the substitute, Giovanni Angelo Becciu, the assessor, Peter Brian Well, Monsignor Carlo Maria Polvani (nephew of the nuncio in the United States, Carlo Maria Viganò) and the heads of the Vatican media, Father Federico Lombardi of Vatican Radio and Giovanni Maria Vian of "L'Osservatore Romano."
With the arrival of Burke from Fox News, the influence of the United States is also growing in the curia.
Already working in Rome are Cardinal Raymond L. Burke, archbishops Augustine Di Noia and Joseph W. Tobin, Monsignor Wells, and Father Michael J. Zielinski. Without counting the retiring cardinal William J. Levada and the retired cardinals Bernard F. Law and James F. Stafford.
But recently the influence of the Americans has also increased with the arrival at the curia of the lawyer Jeffrey Lena, who has been given an office in the secretary of state, and with the growing influence of the leader of the Knights of Columbus, Carl Anderson, who has also become famous for the document he signed by which Ettore Gotti Tedeschi was brutally ejected from the presidency of the Institute for Works of Religion.
THE GENDARMES
The "Vatileaks" case has also brought to light the great power acquired in recent years by the Vatican gendarmes.
It seems so long ago now, the 1970 decision of Paul VI to abolish the pontifical military corps, with the exception of the historic Swiss Guards. Pope Montini turned the gendarmes into a simple security service. But in 2002, this corps went back to the name Gendarmeria, and is formally an agency of the governorate of Vatican City-State.
In reality, it is much more. In recent years, the gendarmes have acquired sophisticated weapons and powerful surveillance equipment. By now even the highest offices of the Vatican hierarchies suspect, rightly or wrongly, that their every whisper can be intercepted. To such an extent that the commander of the gendarmes, Domenico Giani, a former agent of the Italian secret service who has been in office since 2006, is now revered and feared almost more than a secretary of state.
THE SECRETARIAT OF STATE
It is precisely on the figure of the secretary of state that there could be consequences in the medium term.
The unprecedented audience given by Benedict XVI on the afternoon of Saturday, June 23 to Cardinals George Pell, Marc Ouellet, Jean-Louis Tauran, Camillo Ruini e Jozef Tomko, and made public by the press office and by "L'Osservatore Romano," has been universally interpreted by the media as an alarm bell for the stability in the role of Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who was not among the five invited, although this interpretation was quickly denied by Father Lombardi.
On the same day, in the morning, the pope had also presided over a meeting of the heads of the dicasteries of the curia. This meeting had on its agenda not the question of the leaking of documents although at the beginning of the session, the substitute reminded those present of the need to take special care of papers and archives but the examination of the request of a few ecclesial movements like Focolare or the Community of Saint Egidio to be able to incardinate their own clergy directly. The prevalent opinion was that of reiterating that incardination must remain an exclusive faculty of the bishops and religious superiors, with the possibility for the movements to stipulate conventions with dioceses or religious institutes.
Returning to the question of the secretariat of state, beyond the fact of whether and when Benedict XVI will decide to replace his closest collaborator, it seems that the hypothesis is taking hold that Bertone's successor could be a non-Italian.
If this happens, it will mean an unprecedented shift.
In fact, except for the few months during which French cardinal Jean Villot was secretary of state at the beginning of the pontificate of John Paul II who very soon after he was elected reiterated "in scriptis" that this was a matter of a temporary situation in view of the appointment of an Italian, who was to be Agostino Casaroli there is no record of neither the pope nor the secretary of state being an Italian.
This eventuality would find its justification in the desire to purify the Sacred Palaces from the Italian intrigues believed to be at the bottom of "Vatileaks" would then have as a corollary interest the fact that the current management of Italian policy would for the first time fall squarely on the shoulders of the Italian episcopal conference.
ON THE FUTURE POPE
Finally many think the "Vatileaks" question could have consequences for the future selection of a new pontiff.
In fact, the idea that the leaking of documents is the result of entirely Italian intrigues has led to the emergence of a twofold consideration among the cardinals and bishops. On the one hand there are those who think that it would be better that a future Pope not come from Italy. On the other there are those who say that it would be better that he come from there, in order to be better able to unmask and eradicate the intrigues.
But these seem to be purely academic discussions. In the Vatican, in fact, there is no lack of those who associate pope Joseph Ratzinger with the memory of Leo XIII, who was chosen because he was rather elderly according to the criteria of the time, after the extremely long pontificate of Pius IX. And who instead reached the age of 93.
____________
All of the articles from www.chiesa regarding the central government of the Catholic Church:
tickyman: Sorry to all Catholics here, but to me as anachronistic as the British or other monarchies....a fossil of the past - and not a benevolent one. Best sent to the Society for Creative Anachronisms and left at that....deleted as a real and relevant entity, IMO....along with most other 'organized' religions [most something like organized crime - but this one take the 'cake'].
